U.S. Investigating Online Music Pricing

An anonymous reader writes "Times Online has a story about the U.S. Federal Government investigating whether the music labels are fixing prices for online music sales. 'The antitrust division is looking at the possibility of anti-competitive practices in the music download industry ... Mr Jobs suggested such a move would drive owners of Apple's iPod, the hugely popular digital music player, to piracy, a problem that has cost the music industry billions in revenues in recent years.'"

Comments

MOD PARENT DOWN. - come on folks!

[mumblestheclown]

I think the reality is that anti-trust problems and pricefixing problems are pretty much pre-destined anytime you have a monopoly, and when you have a government granted monopoly on copying and distribution (copyrights) it is a money back guarantee.

Absolute and total RUBBISH.

Economics 101: even if I have a monopoly on, say, pineapples, I can not arbitrarily set the price of pineapples to whatever the heck I want and expect people to pay for it.

Reason? A little something known as substitute goods.

If the price of pineapples is too expensive, I buy coconuts. Or grapes. Or apples. Or lemons. Or anything else.

Ah, but the slashdot-esque wanker conspiracy idiot replies: "the RIAA owns the whole orchard!"

DOUBLE RUBBISH.

Even if we were to accept the highly highly specious argument that there are no substitute goods for "music" (in other words, people don't say "music is too expensive, i'll watch a movie / read a book / surf the net / go to the theatre / play with my cat", all of which actually are true and invalidate your nonsense argument further), the fact is that the internet has made self-publishing easy and virtually costless.

If the RIAA manage to extract $20 for a CD or $.99 a song from your neighbor despite the fact that you can put your own music for free or for $.10c on the net then MORE POWER TO THE RIAA. It's called MARKET POWER. It means that they have invested the time and effort to make their product worth what the market is willing to pay. You and I may not like sylvia browne's shite books or britney's shite music, but they have managed to convince the market that they are worth paying over the odds for them.

The basic economic phenomenon here has NOTHING to do with copyrights - save your juvenile rant for another day and another thread and learn some basic economics before you around proclaiming your ignorance in six foot high letters.